Zica,
How many ways to connect a light bulb? Do all of them work all the time? You claim electronics engineering knowledge but you dont do the first steps of troubleshooting with the vendor. Once you get to “is it working properly? Yes/no, no start again from step 1.” You give up and complain but do not help forward the cause.
I come from the Canopy hardware days, my company has had cmm2 through cmm5 (borrowed to test the cmm5, not worth the cost IMO). We have the external GPS sync over power already and it has never let us down. Yes it is a major cost of a whole $500USD shipping included to put a tower online with packetflux but it does its job, period. You want to play as a tier provider then you pay for the system and its backup and you work with your vendor until the L3 engineers know you by name and are having coffee with you.
If you are facing bankruptcy then you have more than enough motivation to make this work with whats at hand. You could decide to either sell excess equipment (there are always those whom would take that deal) that isnt really needed (think f200’s and f180’s, these make awesome private ptp links for clients that want to hook up out buildings) or you could look at what you are doing and how to be more efficient at it. This is a small margins business and you shouldnt be competitive with the big guys, fill the gaps where they miss. We still have clients on 4/1Mbps packages simply because they done need more, dont use it often enough and dont want to be paying 5 times the rate for what they dont use enough to justify. From a physical hardware point, dont use 4 radios where 1 will do. A lot of guys hate omni antennas because they can receive from all angles, but they also dont need to be used to cover 16+km either. Micro pops work better than mega pops, 30 clients an AP is a good number and you can place a sector if you need to provide more bandwidth to one area. Dont overgrow your network, expand if you have contracts in an area, we dont until we have 30 contracts pending and then we use that new area to draw others in. And above all else: diversify, we make almost as much on business service contracts as we do off the WISP network. We even still repair telephone systems that others wont, repair old network installations and upgrade networks to fiber to the desk (you would be amazed at what companies will spend just to not have a network issue), since we are a fiber shop we also have ourselves listed with the telco to do fiber repairs (3pm on a friday and a backhoe finds a fiber line are great payers!) Splicers and otdrs are not as pricy as they use to be and opens a lot of doors. Other things, get with Felenasoft and provide cloud surveillance and ad based wifi in parks (work with your local council for this, then sell ad space and force wifi users to click through an ad every 5 mins, chillispot is good for this), we even have a client that needed a fax line but the copper line to his farm was so bad that a voice conversation would bearly go through, a pair of SPAs and we had a line brought in just for him which he pays for and pays us to brisge the line over our network. We have remote data backup services available and we have two separate datacenters that keep replicas for disaster recovery. These value added options give you versatility to survive and grow (look at backblaze for example). None of these side ventures cost a whole lot to setup, nor does it get complicated with opensource solutions.
I do agree that the support ticket system is a bit much, especially when an ongoing ticket gets closed without you being contacted to check status, but at the same time posting tech files is part of your job as a provider. Things dont get fixed if you dont show how they were broken. Including the need for a very strong signal to reset the standalone gps chip. And by the way we have been running on the internal gps radios now since 4.6.0.1 and havent had a single hold off event using the first edition talgos pucks, just to see if it works. Couldnt care less actually other than its nice to have a backup incase an ESD event takes out the packetflux (it happens, even good ESD protection is no match for a pissed off mother nature). With the Canopy radios we used to bring all of the aux ports to a single box and connect the 3 wires needed together to create a single timing point and would set the BH sm to gate the timing off another tower for backup. Hell even your LTE systems have two timing methods, one is GPS based and the other is NTP based, both are good enough of a 5ms frame.
And for the record, GPS frequency was not chosen for its atmospheric abilities. It was an unused band assigned to the US military that was available for the military project that became the gps system we now have. What you are thinking of is the old 40Mhz radiographic system that is all but lost to history. That system needed lots of towers but could place you within a few feet anywhere within the system, problem was enemy territory usually didnt have classified location technology deployed that you could use.